Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change

197 Pages·2011·3.36 MB·English

by  Raewyn Connell

What does social equality mean now, in a world of markets, C CONFRONTING EQUALITY
global power and new forms of knowledge? O
N GENDER, KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL CHANGE
In Confronting Equality Raewyn Connell combines vivid research with
theoretical insight and radical politics to address this question. The F
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focus moves across family change, class and education, intellectual
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workers, and the global dimension of social science, to contemporary
theorists of knowledge and global power, and the political dilemmas of N
today’s left. Written with clarity and passion, the book proposes a bold
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agenda for social science, and shows it in action.
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Raewyn Connell is known internationally for her powerfully argued
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and field-defining books Masculinities, Gender and Power, Making the

Difference, and Southern Theory. This new volume gathers together a E
broad spectrum of her recent work which distinctively combines close- Q
focus field research and large-scale theory. It brings this to bear on those
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questions of social justice and struggles for change that have long been
at the heart of her writing, and will have wide-ranging implications for A
the social sciences and social activism in the twenty-first century. L
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‘[This is] social science at its best: characterised by richly theorised Y
empirical research, and carving out a place for a radically generative
and engaged world sociology.’ R
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Professor Michael A. Messner, University of Southern California E
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Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney. Y
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Cover illustration: © Sung-Il Kim/Corbis
Cover design by: Raven Design
RAEWYN CONNELL
S O C IOL O G Y
Confronting Equality
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Confronting Equality
Gender, Knowledge and Global Change
RAEWYN CONNELL
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2011
First published in the United Kingdom in 2011 by Polity Press
Copyright © Raewyn Connell, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in
writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a
maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to
be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided
that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration
notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
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Fax: [phone]
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Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74237 668 4
Printed and bound in Australia by The SOS Print + Media Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction page 1
1 C hange among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities
and Gender Equality 7
2 S teering towards Equality? How Gender Regimes
Change inside the State 25
3 T he Neoliberal Parent: Mothers and Fathers in Market
Society 41
4 W orking-Class Families and the New Secondary
Education 58
5 Good Teachers on Dangerous Ground 73
6 Not the Pyramids: Intellectual Workers Today 89
7 Sociology has a World History 103
8 P aulin Hountondji’s Postcolonial Sociology of
Knowledge 119
9 Antonio Negri’s Theory of Empire 136
10 Bread and Waratahs: A Letter to the Next Left 154
Acknowledgements 167
References 170
Index 187
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Introduction
Late in 2009, the United Nations convened a great meeting in
Copenhagen on an issue being defi ned as the greatest challenge of
our time. Specialists in climate science had warned for years about
the growing turbulence and risk resulting from human activities
that change and especially heat the atmosphere. After two weeks
of bitter wrangling, the governments of the world went home,
having agreed on almost nothing. Developing countries, led by
China, refused more restrictions on their high-pollution drive for
economic growth; rich countries, led by the United States, refused
the demand to wind down their high-consumption way of life.
In mid 2010, the British-based transnational oil corporation BP
had a nasty accident at an underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico,
resulting from the urgent search for more fossil fuel as the time of
‘peak oil’ approaches. A media blitz followed the threat of pollu-
tion to the southern coast of the United States. A few media stories
– only a few – drew a parallel with the catastrophe that had already
surrounded oil spills on another continent. The Niger River delta
has been the scene of epic corruption, social dislocation, civil war
and devastating pollution since the oil companies arrived in the
1950s.
2 Introduction
These traumatic events are not bad luck and not failures of
personal leadership. They are consequences of the way our insti-
tutions and structures work: decisions in the hands of small elites,
global struggle for profi ts and power, massive inequalities of
resources, and the triumph of short-term calculation. We do not
have a global environment problem, really. We have a global social
problem. Ecological crisis and injustice can only be solved by social
action and institutional change.
The spread of HIV/AIDS, to take another critical issue, is not
just a medical problem. From the early years of the epidemic it
was clear that only social action could stop it. Community mobil-
izations did stop it, in some places – but not widely enough. The
global epidemic continues to spread through social pathways
formed by poverty, violence and patriarchy.
Across a broad range of other issues, people grappling with
practical dilemmas need to understand large-scale social processes.
Women in organizations facing the ‘glass ceiling’, teachers troub-
led about over-surveillance of their work, activists dealing with
domestic violence, knowledge workers grappling with marginal-
ity, all are stronger if they have reliable knowledge about how the
problems arose and why they are intractable.
That argument motivates the research discussed in this book.
We need social science because social processes shape human
destini es. If we are to take control of our future, we need to under-
stand society as much as we need to understand the atmosphere,
the earth, and men’s and women’s bodies.
There are many dubious interpretations of the social world
on offer. There is market ideology, where every problem has
the same solution – private property and unrestrained markets.
There is ‘virtual sociology’ (skewered by Judith Stacey in her
recent book Unhitched) where pressure-groups select the research
results they like, ignore the ones they don’t, and so present their
own p rejudices as scientifi c fi ndings. The most enjoyable pseudo-
science is the pop sociology of market research fi rms: Generation
X, Generation Y, the creative class, the mommy track, the metro-
sexuals, the sensitive new-age guy, the new traditionals, the
aspirationals, the sea-changers . . . The names usually defi ne faintly
Introduction 3
recognizable types, or at any rate marketing strategies, and the
audience in wealthy countries fi ll in the details for themselves.
Social science is harder. It is slower. Knowledge grows by a
collective process of exploration that is complex and uncertain.
Research must be unpredictable, since we never know at the
start what the results will be. (If we do know, it isn’t research!)
Social science needs patience and it does not suit media dead-
lines. It also needs resources, especially people and time. For
intellectual work to be done there has to be a workforce; and
that is not easily assembled or kept in being. There is often an
awkward gap between signifi cant questions and the means of
answering them.
Research is usually imagined as the gathering of data, but there
is much more to it. Clarifying language, generating new con-
cepts, relating ideas to each other, building interpretations – these
too are necessary steps in producing knowledge. Theory is often
handed over, with a sigh of relief, to a small group of specialists.
It shouldn’t be. Theory is basically about trying to think beyond
the immediately given; and this is business that concerns everyone
with a stake in social science. In my experience, the best theoreti-
cal ideas bubble up in the midst of empirical research or practical
problems and start talking to the facts straight away.
The theories most widely used in social science come from
Europe and North America. This is increasingly recognized as a
problem. We have become conscious of the imperial history of
social science itself and the limitations of vision in even the greatest
thinkers of the global North. There is now a vigorous and exciting
debate about how to create a world social science that mobilizes
the social experience and intellectual resources of the South –
where, after all, most of the people live.
This book moves across the spectrum from empirical research
to the global politics of knowledge. Three chapters report fi eld
studies: on gender equity in the public sector, school education
and intellectual labour. Two chapters report documentary studies:
on changing ideas about good teachers, and the global history
of sociology. Two chapters try to synthesize a research fi eld:
on men’s involvement with gender equality, and parent–child